Jul 20, 2016 · The default value for IFS consists of whitespace characters (to be precise: space, tab and newline). Each character can be a word boundary. So, with the default value of IFS, …

The following few threads on this site and StackOverflow were helpful for understanding how IFS works: What is IFS in context of for looping? How to loop over the lines of a file Bash, read line …

Feb 20, 2023 · The default value of IFS is space, tab and newline, so if foo prints out two lines hello world and howdy then the loop body is executed with x=hello, then x=world and …

Jun 12, 2015 · IFS is the Input Field Separator, which means the string read will be split based on the characters in IFS. On a command line, IFS is normally any whitespace characters, that's …

As Stephane points out below, the order of characters within IFS is significant when expanding "$*". From the bash man page: "$*" is equivalent to "$1c$2c...", where c is the first character of …

Aug 17, 2011 · The IFS= read -r line sets the environment variable IFS (to an empty value) specifically for the execution of read. This is an instance of the general simple command …

Any character in IFS that is not IFS whitespace, along with any adjacent IFS whitespace characters, delimits a field. A sequence of IFS whitespace characters is also treated as a …

Mar 15, 2017 · Consecutive separator characters that are whitespace are treated as a single separator, so the result of the expansion of cat${IFS}file.txt is two words: cat and file.txt. Non …

Dec 22, 2006 · Hi, This is out of curiosity: I wanted to extract year, month and date from a variable, and thought that combining read and IFS would help, but this doesn't work: echo …

Mar 19, 2021 · An alternative way of doing this, suggested by LL3 in comments (now deleted), relies on prefixing the unset command by :, a built-in utility that does nothing, effectively …